Tohoku

Tohoku was long the frontier. In the 8th and 9th centuries the court at Nara and then Kyoto sent armies north against the Emishi, peoples who resisted its rule, and campaigns under Sakanoue no Tamuramaro around 800 pushed the border northwards from the fortress of Taga near today's Sendai. In the 11th and 12th centuries the Northern Fujiwara ruled the north from Hiraizumi, growing rich on gold and horses and building Buddhist temples to rival Kyoto's, until Minamoto no Yoritomo destroyed them in 1189.

Under the Tokugawa the region was divided among powerful lords: the Date at Sendai, whose founder Date Masamune built the castle town from 1600 and sent an embassy to Rome, the Tsugaru at Hirosaki, the Nanbu at Morioka, the Satake in Akita, and the Matsudaira of Aizu. In 1689 the poet Basho walked through Tohoku on the journey he recorded in Oku no Hosomichi, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North".

In the Boshin War of 1868 most northern domains joined an alliance against the new Meiji government. Aizu fell after a month-long siege, and the region was later seen as a poor hinterland supplying rice, soldiers and labour to Tokyo. On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast sent a tsunami into the Sanriku coast and the Sendai plain, leaving more than 22,000 dead or missing and triggering the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Rebuilding, with new sea walls and raised towns, has taken more than a decade.

Tohoku has a reputation within Japan for reserved, hard-working, patient people shaped by long winters and poor harvests. The Tohoku dialects are among the hardest for other Japanese to follow, and the Tsugaru speech of western Aomori is famously dense. The region's folk music includes the fast, percussive Tsugaru-jamisen, a style of shamisen playing born here.

Summer festivals are its great public events. Aomori's Nebuta Matsuri in early August parades giant illuminated paper figures of warriors and gods, Akita's Kanto Matsuri balances tall bamboo poles hung with dozens of lanterns on performers' hands, foreheads and hips, Sendai's Tanabata, the largest in Japan, hangs intricate paper decorations, and Yamagata's Hanagasa dancers carry flowered straw hats. On the Oga peninsula, men dressed as the Namahage — ogre-like visitors in straw capes — go from house to house on New Year's Eve warning children to behave, a custom listed as UNESCO intangible heritage.

Crafts are strong: kokeshi, the limbless painted wooden dolls of the hot-spring villages; Nanbu cast-iron kettles from Morioka; Aizu lacquerware; and the cherry-bark work of Kakunodate. In Yokote, children build kamakura snow huts in February, with an altar to the water god inside, and grill rice cakes in them.

About 8.5 million people live in Tohoku, and the population is falling. Sendai, with about 1.1 million, is the only large city — a university and commercial centre of tree-lined avenues rebuilt after wartime bombing. Koriyama and Iwaki in Fukushima, Akita, Morioka, Aomori and Yamagata are the prefectural and regional centres, each of roughly 200,000 to 350,000 people.

Farming defines the landscape: Tohoku is one of Japan's main rice bowls, and Aomori grows more apples than any other prefecture, while Yamagata is known for cherries and Fukushima for peaches. Fishing and oyster and seaweed farming sustain the Sanriku coast.

The pressures are depopulation and ageing, as young people leave for Sendai and Tokyo, and the long aftermath of 2011. Along the coast, towns have been rebuilt on higher ground behind new sea walls, while parts of Fukushima prefecture near the nuclear plant have reopened only gradually and have far fewer residents than before. Winter snow-clearing is a daily routine across the Sea of Japan side.

Sendai's signature dish is gyutan, thick slices of grilled beef tongue served with barley rice and oxtail soup, and its sweet is zunda mochi, rice cakes coated in a bright green paste of mashed edamame. Akita has kiritanpo, pounded rice shaped around cedar sticks and toasted, then simmered in a chicken hotpot, along with thin, silky Inaniwa udon and iburi-gakko, smoked pickled daikon. Iwate is known for wanko soba, served in small bowls that are refilled until the diner stops them, and Morioka for chilled reimen noodles and jajamen.

In autumn Yamagata holds imoni gatherings on riverbanks, cooking a stew of taro, beef and leeks in the open air, and Yonezawa beef is one of Japan's prized wagyu brands. Kitakata in Fukushima has its own soy-based ramen with flat, wavy noodles, and Hachinohe makes senbei-jiru, a soup thickened with pieces of wheat cracker.

The coast supplies oysters from Matsushima and other seafood, and the tuna landed at Oma on the tip of the Shimokita peninsula are among the most expensive in Japan. Fruit is a point of pride — Aomori apples, Yamagata cherries, Fukushima peaches — and the region's cold winters and good rice make it one of Japan's leading sake areas, and Fukushima's breweries are among the most decorated in the country.

Sendai is the gateway: the ornate Zuihoden mausoleum of Date Masamune, the site of Aoba Castle above the city and the zelkova-lined avenue of Jozenji-dori. Matsushima Bay, half an hour away, is scattered with pine-covered islets best seen by boat or from the hills around it, with the Zen temple of Zuiganji and the little Godaido hall on the shore. Inland in Iwate, Hiraizumi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, keeps the temple of Chuson-ji and the gold-leaf Konjikido hall of the Northern Fujiwara.

In Akita, the samurai town of Kakunodate keeps its broad street of wooden residences and weeping cherries, and nearby Lake Tazawa is the deepest lake in Japan, with the old bathhouses of Nyuto Onsen in the hills above. Hirosaki Castle in Aomori is one of Japan's few surviving original keeps, ringed by moats and cherry trees; to its south-west lie the beech forests of Shirakami-Sanchi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and to its east Lake Towada and the Oirase stream, at their best in autumn.

Yamagata holds Yamadera, the cliffside temple of Risshakuji, and Ginzan Onsen, the lamp-lit hot spring village of wooden inns near Obanazawa, as well as the three sacred mountains of Dewa Sanzan and the ski slopes of Zao, where winter winds coat the fir trees in ice. In Fukushima, Aizu-Wakamatsu's Tsuruga Castle and the thatched post town of Ouchi-juku recall the Edo-era road north.